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I'm surprised, to me it always looks & feels very different than most other Western cities, in part due to low-rise buildings and almost exclusively independently operated restaurants and shops.

Most other large European cities allowed for high rises and chain coffee shops & restaurants, to the point where they've started to become indistinguishable from one another.

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Paris has the CBD called La Défense which looked like most cities to me. Apparently tourists and residents alike hate it.

The rest of Paris is pretty "European city" and maybe I'm not tuned into the differences, but it seemed quite like Munich, Rome, or Barcelona except for the language, etc.

For me the size of the core of Paris what make it different. It's still comparatively small, but you can walk for hours through streets with shops and restaurants. In other European cities I feel like I hit much faster the suburbs.

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